Day of Rest

We took the day off today to lay around, read, and cook. We really needed the rest after all the walking we'd been doing and the late nights.
Gin and Katie went to the only open chino and tried to find the ingredients we needed for our vegetable couscous casserole recipe. They ended up substituting a lot of things. We didn't know what we were going to end up with, but we persevered. Our obstacles: we didn't have most of the required ingredients, we couldn't understand all the instructions for making the couscous (they were in Spanish), we had a funky Celsius oven that would only heat up if the timer was turned on first, we had to translate from customary units (cups, teaspoons, Fahrenheit) to metric units (grams, Celsius), and there were three cooks in the kitchen.
We mixed things together the best that we could and put it in the oven. While it cooked, I washed spinach leaves, and Katie and Ginny tried to make flan for dessert. It was flan-in-a-box, but again the instructions were in Spanish. They mixed and cooked and poured the flan into the prepared cups. It was getting thick, kind of like pudding. Then I remembered that the instructions said to add sugar. So the flan mix had to be poured back into the pan, reheated, and sugar added.
By the time the flan mix was poured back into the cups and placed in the refrigerator, it was time to take our casserole out of the oven. It smelled good and didn't look too bad either. We spooned it out onto the spinach leaves on our plates and enjoyed our meal. Yes, it was good. However, Katie didn't like the garbanzo beans we'd substituted for the black beans, so she removed them.
Later, we had the flan. The taste was good, too, but Ginny didn't like the texture. I guess we messed that up when we recooked it. Oh, well.
It was a fun cooking experience, we all learned what couscous is, and three cooks in the kitchen worked out quite well this time.